The present invention relates to rewarding users of an online network who perform a desired activity. In particular, it relates to awarding an incentive to an eligible user as a function of that user's position within the network's topology.
Businesses that wish to encourage users of social networks and other types of networks and online communities to perform a certain activity may provide an incentive to a user that performs the desired activity. That incentive may be in the form of an electronic or printed coupon or a discount code that the user may apply to an online or bricks-and-mortar purchase; a cash-value award transferred to a user's personal account or to a user account associated with the network or online community; or any other type of incentive, such as access to a secured online asset or to otherwise-restricted or secured feature of a software program.
Such incentives may be used to encourage any type of desired online behavior, such as forwarding a link or other online content, clicking through an online link or advertisement, completing a survey, opening an account, playing or downloading a data file or audio/visual content, upgrading or updating a software application, or submitting feedback, comments, reviews, or other information.
More sophisticated incentive systems also provide rewards for users who in some way facilitate another user's performance of a desired activity. For example, if an online ad includes a “Share” button that allows a first user to forward the ad to a second user who, in response, makes a desired purchase, a “multi-level” incentive system might provide a full incentive to the purchasing user and a partial incentive to the intermediary forwarding user.
Multi-level systems may determine the value of a reward by referring to a reward schedule. Such schedules may be based on a formula for computing full and partial incentives or may be as simple as setting an award value to an arbitrary flat amount or to a fixed percent of the deemed value of a desired activity. But even a relatively simple schedule capable of determining partial awards for intermediary users can become complex on larger networks, where many intermediary network nodes may lie along a network path from a “seed node” of the network, which originates a solicitation to perform a desired activity, to a “performer node” of a user who actually performs the desired activity.
One problem with such network-reward mechanisms is that not all users have identical value to a solicitor. Some users, for example, may have a far greater number of connections to other users or may be the network's only connection to a large subnetwork of desired users.
Practical, real-world implementations of multi-level reward mechanisms generally cannot account for such differences in the relative values of intermediary nodes. There is therefore a need for a method to determine relative values of nodes in order to provide more accurate incentives to users who occupy an intermediary position between a seed node and a performer node.